the surfeit of digital image-production—spam advertising being the most abundant—is neither the swarm of wish-fulfilment fantasies nor the tool of domination it is often taken to be

This is the moment when panegyrics to ‘American empire’ were much in vogue.

Reagan was in truth always a dove, refusing all large-scale interventions and then eagerly seizing on the opportunity to embrace Gorbachev, all against the serried force of his own neo-con supporters.

The Long Telegram (just as the later X-Article) is ‘rejectionist’ through and through. It was precisely this aspect that made it so useful. The Soviet regime became an unchangeable essence of total, destructive, expansionist power, a state with which no relations of traditional diplomacy were possible.

This had always been Kennan’s tendential position. It now became the official US position.

The universalism of the Truman Doctrine in March 1947 was thus not a mistake or a momentary lapse of judgement. It was essential for the whole operation.

the presidency commands and acts in virtually untrammelled ways

These are tendentious stabs at critique, designed to back up Short’s notion of a drip-drip-drip effect of colonial inculcation, and they are weak ones.

that sits better with the theoretical impulses worked through here from cultural studies and Habermasian ideas